Recurrent Dreams

(click here for the Romanian version)

My repetitive dream: living the real life in Bucharest. I just woke up, Bucharest is far away. Saturday morning. Incredible weather for January: over sixty degrees! Bucharest is far away, only weather is the same there – I just called.

It’s time for some hiking. Where to go? Anyway, some place up the Potomac border. To Brookmont maybe? And then to descend some steps on the Valley Road towards Little Falls? Or to the Glen Echo Park? Then I’d descend on the border beyond the Sycamore Island. Or even up to Cabin John Bridge? It used to be there the terminus stop for the old street car, linking these villages to Georgetown. The street car stopped running back in the eighties, now you can hardly see its trace here and there along Potomac Avenue.

I prepare hastily some snacks, throw them in my backpack, then run to take the metro from Vienna. Virginian Vienna, in the Greater DC area.

Austrian Vienna … Living in the Communist paradise and dreaming at normality …. Vienna was our closest dream. Someone was telling me, that morning when I arrived at Vienna, as I get off the train, from the station platform you could see the whole city. I breathed deeply the air; it smelled like freedom. Suddenly life deserved to be lived. It was back in the seventies.

I took a book in the backpack. I’ve read it, only it’s hard to leave. A Romanian book, by Felicia Antip, Aventuri ale constiintei de sine. A book speaking about books speaking themselves about imaginary books. The world of Felicia Antip – a universe of universes … the world of recurrent dreams.

A joyful, noisy group steps in. Two families, husbands, wives, kids. They speak seemingly Greek, seemingly Spanish. I ask them, are you Brazilians? Yes, comes their reply, and where are you from? Romania, I say. They look at me joyfully surprised.

At Metro Center I switch trains, I’m going to Bethesda.

Now there is at Jerusalem by the sheep market a pool, which is called in the Hebrew tongue Bethesda, having five porches. In these lay a great multitude of impotent folk, of blind, halt, withered, waiting for the moving of the water. For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had… the text from the Gospel according to John, on an iron plate in front of the large bookstore in Bethesda.

Only I don’t want to go to that bookstore, it is another one, a small one, of used books, the books to be found everywhere on the shelves and on the floor. This bookshop used to be in Georgetown. They moved to Bethesda, only they kept their name, Georgetown Bookshop. It’s the place where I discovered Sudek, the great photographer from Prague, famous between the two world wars.

And it is the place where I met again Boris Pilniak. I had left him in the pages of a book by Alexandru Sahia, an edition printed in the thirties – Stalin would send him to disappear in the Gulag, then Pilniak disappeared also from the other editions of Sahia’s book, as they were printed after 1944. Now Pilniak is here, at the Georgetown Bookshop in Bethesda.

Josef Sudek, the photographer who lived in Prague – an eggshell, a pin, a leaf, something that’s looking as the shape of an old book – Sudek took banal objects and pulled out grains of sky.

And a bit further, also on the floor, an album with the churches of Kremlin. Blagoveshtcenskii Sobor among them, with the iconostasis painted partly by Rubliov, partly by Feofan Grek. I remember the day when I was there to look at Rubliov’s icons. It was an afternoon, the other excursionists went to the Museum for Oriental Art, only I chose to come again to the Kremlin, to see Blagoveshtcenskii Sobor, and the iconostasis. A small cathedral, very well balanced – it used to be the imperial chapel in the very old times. The icons of Rubliov, with their incredible blue, and their incredible grace. One day before I had been at Tretiakov, to find the icon section there closed for a perpetual renovation. So now, at Blagoveshtcenskii Sobor it was my first meeting with Rubliov’s art face to face. The first and the last encounter – I would meet Rubliov after that only in albums.

I bought from that bookshop some time ago an album with icons by Omiros - a Greek-American contemporary painter, who is trying to revive Byzantine art, using a non-figurative approach. His saints are guessed shapes, among grains of tears.

Only this bookshop is today closed, and the windows are filled with thick paper. I enter the hair design saloon nearby and ask the cashier what happened. She says, I think he knows, and shows me one of the hair dressers, an old guy with a very gentle approach. He comes to me smiling, how nice to see you again. Have you come on purpose, or just to say to me hi?

I am a bit puzzled, I think you are making a confusion. We haven’t met before, except if you come from Romania.

No, not from Romania. Are you born there? he asks me.

No, in Paris, it’s a bit complicated And you?

I’m born in Germany.

Well, so we don’t really know each other. Actually I came to ask you about the bookshop.

Oh, what a pity! They closed it, now it’s only on the web. What a pity, there were so many folks coming and spending hours among the books, what a pity! I feel so sorry for you.

He seems to me as a hero who has just descended from the novels of Gustav Meyrink.

Many years ago, in Beijing, as I was in front of a shopkeeper, he started the conversation exactly the same, how nice to see you again!

I’m afraid you confuse me. I’m coming here for the first time in my life.

Then your face reminds me of someone else… Mr. Dan came today here, such a nice gentleman! But you all, Romanian gentlemen, are very nice.

How do you know that I am a Romanian?

Oh, I am pretty sure that you came here before.

I am now far from Bethesda, in the woods. I don’t know yet where my destination will be. A tourist post warns me suddenly with its arrow: 10,000 Km to Luxor. That’s okay, at least I know now where I am.

(Bethesda)